Posted on 03/09/2021 9:43:22 AM PST by MtnClimber
Algorithms are meaningless without good data. The public can exploit that to demand change.
Every day, your life leaves a trail of digital breadcrumbs that tech giants use to track you. You send an email, order some food, stream a show. They get back valuable packets of data to build up their understanding of your preferences. That data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and recommendations. Google cashes your data in for over $120 billion a year of ad revenue.
Increasingly, we can no longer opt out of this arrangement. In 2019 Kashmir Hill, then a reporter for Gizmodo, famously tried to cut five major tech giants out of her life. She spent six weeks being miserable, struggling to perform basic digital functions. The tech giants, meanwhile, didn’t even feel an itch.
Now researchers at Northwestern University are suggesting new ways to redress this power imbalance by treating our collective data as a bargaining chip. Tech giants may have fancy algorithms at their disposal, but they are meaningless without enough of the right data to train on.
In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage:
Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it—leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance. Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google’s ad-targeting algorithms.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
I didn’t know they had adb.ock for android. I use it on comp. Actually I thi k it is adblock ultimate. I’ll check for adb,ock on android. The browser I use, ff, only has very limmitted adons In Android . Guess I would have to download an app of ab?
Lol good one! Will have to remember that 😆
bfl
I’ve been doing the same thing on my FR homepage for at least a couple of years now....
I go to some of the sickest porn on the web. It tickles me to think of Serge, Tim Cook, Bill Gates and John Brennon all peering over my shoulder checking it out. Sick bastids.
That's what you think. On what device(s)?
Yup. I dont use ff browser as their community hates trump, and they kicked out the conservative engineer who made FF the browser it is today. Your call.
What have I just done? I just went to youtube, opened the Oprah interview with Prince Harry and Megan Markle and clicked the like button!
My friend asked how Google maps know the traffic conditions so accurately. I told him cell phone location services.
Yep. They have speed limit data for roads and your phone places you in the middle of the road. If your cell phone is not moving at the speed limit then google knows it. How long until the police issue speeding tickets based on cell phone tracking?
on my linux im using waterfox- I just got the android tablet, so haven’t looked into what browsers will work on it yet-
Judging by the ads I get, Big Data thinks I’m an elderly male young mother of two, who suffers from ED and teenage acne.
Pretty sure the metadata is already poisoned.
I love that!!!
No one knows you’re a dog....
WHAT ?
You’ll start getting ads for T’Pau’s
Vulcan “Faster than light Quantum Gel” for those awkward Pomfar 7 year itches!
Spam mail from Orion slave girls just eager to please....
Ads from Tesla motors...yes look closely...Musk is an alien, he just looks too “odd” to be really human.
A black sedan with two dark suited men wearing tinted glasses seated in side monitoring your every move!
A visitation in the middle of the night by Biden in an alien space suit who awakens you as he rubs your leg hairs while saying...”Nice doggy, have you taken office yet?”
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